Recipes

Here is a recipe for the base beer of Warsaw Baltic Porter from a recipe from the now shut-down Royal Warsaw Brewery, one of the original brewers of the Baltic Porter. The author went on to ice (lodowy) half of the fermented beer to make it a Warszawski Porter Lodowy.

This recipe is somewhat of a compromise in mash techniques. Traditionally, this is a decocted style, but we’re going to use a step mash and a little extra character malt instead. If you want to use a decoction, I’ll describe that as well.

I’ve played around with this recipe several times, and like the balance it has now but I always have ideas of things I’d like to try. It’s a fairly simple grain bill, and I like to use Belgian malts (Dingemans, specifically) for the grains.

On scale, Odell uses a hammer mill to reduce the whole hops down to a coarse, dried spice-like material that passes through the pores of a particular-sized grate before being extruded from the machine. They fresh grind just before brewing but due to utilization and batch size this requires 8 hours of manpower.